Sonos reveals its latest smart speaker with voice control

Sonos has always been a leading brand in the wireless speaker market and its latest product – the Sonos One – is even smarter and can access multiple voice services including Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

The voice-controlled Sonos One smart speaker can play music, podcasts and audiobooks from more than 80 streaming services.

Users can talk to the speaker and hear the weather, news, traffic reports and their favourite music.

But for Australian customers there will be a bit of a wait before they can access voice services.

Amazon Alexa will only be available for US, UK and Germany at this time and Google Assistant won’t be available until 2018.

The Sonos One smart speaker will also be compatible with Apple Airplay 2 but that won’t be available until next year.

Naturally Sonos One will work with the existing family of Sonos speakers and can be integrated into an existing multi-room audio set-up.

You can use Sonos One as a standalone speaker and also pair two of them together to create a stereo pair.

Despite being a relatively small speaker, the Sonos One can produce a big sound thanks to two Class-D digital amplifiers, tweeter and mid-woofer.

Also onboard is a six-mic array and an adaptive noise cancellation algorithm so it can pinpoint the person speaking in the room.

The speaker’s voice capture technology will allow the user to be heard over the music with the volume automatically lowered when the user speaks to it.

The Sonos app has also had a makeover to allow for simpler navigation, easier access to controls and a better way to navigate your music and content.

“There are many speakers out there that you can control with your voice, but most of them are just devices that make sounds, not systems designed for delivering great sound easily in any room of your home,” said Giles Martin, Sound Experience Leader at Sonos.

“We essentially blended three separate ecosystems with the ability to start the music playing with voice, add songs to your playlist from the Sonos app, and play music in a different room from your Spotify app – it’s so simple to use but took quite a bit of work to create.”

The Sonos One will be available on October 24 and will be priced at $299.